SPEAKER_00: There's a phrase that is often said, you never know that Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.
SPEAKER_00: And that is a very true statement I have found through the years.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've noticed that when people who are Christians blow it publicly, they'll often say that was the worst day of their life and the best day of their lives.
SPEAKER_00: I had a student years ago who was in a fraternity and he publicly blew it at a party.
SPEAKER_00: And he said it was the best day of his life.
SPEAKER_00: And the reason it was the best day of his life because he was a Christian, and the whole time he was in his fraternity, he was trying to walk around showing people what a good Christian looks like.
SPEAKER_00: This is what a good Christian looks like.
SPEAKER_00: So he's constantly holding up this image of himself that's not true, it's not real, it's it's a cardboard cutout.
SPEAKER_00: And so many of us do that, of carrying around the image we want to project to other people that we think, hey, this is the way that I want you to think about me.
SPEAKER_00: And eventually that thing gets to where it feels like it weighs 500 pounds, where you just feel like this is a heavy burden to carry.
SPEAKER_00: And the reality is that for many people, the day that they publicly blow it and their facade falls to the ground, and they have to stand there for people to see what they're really like, is the most freeing day ever.
SPEAKER_00: Because you don't know that Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.
SPEAKER_00: And so we're coming into Galatians chapter 1 again, because we're in the museum, remember?
SPEAKER_00: And we are looking at this piece of artwork that's here in our Bible to direct us to the grace of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And this Galatians is important because it's a head-on, sustained conversation about something that we think we understand, and that is dwelling in Jesus, living in Jesus, believing in Jesus, saying that Jesus is all that I need, and Jesus is all that I have.
SPEAKER_00: So, if you're willing, if you're able, let me invite you to stand as we read Galatians 1, verses 6 through 10.
SPEAKER_00: I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed or eternally condemned.
SPEAKER_00: As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.
SPEAKER_00: For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God?
SPEAKER_00: Or am I trying to please man?
SPEAKER_00: If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Let's send to the reading of God's word.
SPEAKER_00: Let me pray and ask him to bless us as we dig into it.
SPEAKER_00: There's a great deal here, Lord Jesus, that is challenging for us.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a great deal here that is freeing for us.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm afraid that I, as the person standing up front, am not going to do a very good job of holding forth all of these things.
SPEAKER_00: So I pray that you, in your grace, you would teach us by your spirit, by your word, that you would use my words to do that, but that you would go above and beyond all the preparation I put in, all the words that I've written, all the words that I say.
SPEAKER_00: That you would have a conversation with each of our hearts about the nature of living and full faith in the grace of our great God.
SPEAKER_00: Bless us and be with us and pour out your spirit as we now turn our attention to your word and we ask it in Christ's name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Please be seated.
SPEAKER_00: Now the Apostle Paul, you you probably picked up on this.
SPEAKER_00: He might be a little upset as he's writing this.
SPEAKER_00: The Apostle Paul is astonished, alarmed, really, that these Galatians are so quickly deserting the one who called them to the grace of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: They had experienced an immediate, deep, profound, life-changing response to the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and they quickly abandoned it.
SPEAKER_00: How?
SPEAKER_00: Why did they do that?
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't because they wanted to go party, which is often what we think, but that was the exact opposite.
SPEAKER_00: They abandoned the grace of Jesus for laws and rules and regulations for self-righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: So Paul is alarmed.
SPEAKER_00: After receiving such an amazing gift from God, why would you give it away?
SPEAKER_00: Why would you abandon it?
SPEAKER_00: Why would you uh trade it away for something that is doomed to fail you, to enslave you, to destroy you, to sour you on the inside.
SPEAKER_00: And this is why Galatians is so important.
SPEAKER_00: We all have this tendency quickly to desert the one who has called us in the grace of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: This is what R.
SPEAKER_00: C.
SPEAKER_00: Sproul wrote.
SPEAKER_00: He said, Grace is hard to grasp, hard to hold on to, even if you understand it, and hard to retain.
SPEAKER_00: And we see this with ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Grace for us is often interrupted.
SPEAKER_00: Grace keeps slipping through our fingers.
SPEAKER_00: How would you know, how would you know that grace is interrupted in your life?
SPEAKER_00: Well, you stop delighting, you stop caring, you stop sharing, you become sour about people, you become sour about life.
SPEAKER_00: You attend, you show up, but you don't carry it with you.
SPEAKER_00: And you start counting.
SPEAKER_00: You start counting and comparing what other people are doing and what they're not doing, what they're supposed to be doing, what they're not doing.
SPEAKER_00: You start complaining about everything.
SPEAKER_00: So I had a student 20 years ago, and after he had been graduated for a decade, he we had some sort of a function where he showed up at church for over the weekend and had a conversation with me.
SPEAKER_00: And he said the best advice I ever gave him as a pastor was to quit having his quiet time.
SPEAKER_00: Now I know you're thinking that's the worst advice any pastor ever gave to anybody.
SPEAKER_00: But he had just told me in a conversation that he had had his quiet time for 187 consecutive days.
SPEAKER_00: That's a very specific number.
SPEAKER_00: So that meant that he had been counting.
SPEAKER_00: And what that meant is he was basing his righteousness on how often he was having his quiet time.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what he told me.
SPEAKER_00: He said it was great advice for him because uh he said what he found is he kept asking people about their quiet time to find out how regular their quiet time was.
SPEAKER_00: And he found himself becoming prideful and arrogant about this thing that's supposed to be a means of grace in our lives to help us grow in our relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you start comparing.
SPEAKER_00: When we start measuring ourselves by performance and good deeds, we begin to measure other people by whether or not they're doing it.
SPEAKER_00: And so it fosters a critical heart, and we inwardly begin to see the work of Jesus less and more the failures of others.
SPEAKER_00: And the Galatians were doing that.
SPEAKER_00: And we do it.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody does that.
SPEAKER_00: So, what is the gospel he's talking about here?
SPEAKER_00: He gives a shorthand for this as he begins in verse 6.
SPEAKER_00: I am astonished that you are so quickly him deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.
SPEAKER_00: So sometimes it's the grace of Christ, sometimes it's the gospel of Christ, but we're going to refer to it sometimes this morning as the gospel of the grace of Christ, just interchangeably with all these things.
SPEAKER_00: So, what is grace?
SPEAKER_00: Grace is God showing favor to undeserving people.
SPEAKER_00: So then we have to back up because most of us don't use the word favor in our day-to-day language.
SPEAKER_00: We might talk about a party favor, but that's about it.
SPEAKER_00: So, what does favor mean?
SPEAKER_00: Well, think about the word favorite.
SPEAKER_00: It means you have a good opinion, you're affectionate towards it, you love whatever it is.
SPEAKER_00: And what we see as we look at scriptures, God shows favor to the deserving.
SPEAKER_00: We see that throughout scripture.
SPEAKER_00: God shows favor to those who deserve it.
SPEAKER_00: Now here's the reality: that's only one person.
SPEAKER_00: He earned that.
SPEAKER_00: It's only Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: He had the Father's good opinion.
SPEAKER_00: He was the Father's favorite.
SPEAKER_00: He committed no sin, no deceit was in his mouth.
SPEAKER_00: He cared for the widows and poor and the orphans.
SPEAKER_00: He loved people, he sought the lost, his heart was completely pure.
SPEAKER_00: And so when Jesus died, the father validated him and said, This is my son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased.
SPEAKER_00: So in that way, we see absolutely in Scripture, God shows favor to the deserving.
SPEAKER_00: But grace is the opposite of that.
SPEAKER_00: Because grace is God showing favor to the undeserving.
SPEAKER_00: We call that grace.
SPEAKER_00: God loves us, makes us his favorite, treats us as if we deserved it when we really don't.
SPEAKER_00: So three things about grace here.
SPEAKER_00: One, grace is free.
SPEAKER_00: Favor can rest on someone who has something to offer.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is a gift given freely and generously.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is completely unmerited.
SPEAKER_00: It is not a reward, it is not deserved, it is bestowed to an unworthy recipient who does one thing, believes that God and Jesus is worthy.
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is complete.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is not what makes up the difference of our failure.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is a pure gift of God where he says, I'm replacing your account completely with the account of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: So he completely takes all of the guilt of all of our sin and has placed it on Jesus at the cross.
SPEAKER_00: And when Jesus died, he died for the guilt of all of our sins.
SPEAKER_00: And then he gives us the merit and the righteous account of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: So the righteous account of Jesus becomes ours.
SPEAKER_00: We have a joint bank account with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It is a complete and utter gift of generosity.
SPEAKER_00: And it is completely counterintuitive.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is not merely unmerited, it's demerited, and that's not the way the world works.
SPEAKER_00: You actually deserve the opposite.
SPEAKER_00: You deserve condemnation, but you're instead exalted, a gift of benevolence given to someone who deserves the opposite.
SPEAKER_00: And the gospel of the grace of Christ is this all of our sins have been placed upon Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: All of them.
SPEAKER_00: All the sins that you have forgotten, and all the sins you can't forget.
SPEAKER_00: All of them have been placed on Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And replacing that is the righteous life of Christ who deserves to have the good affection of the Father.
SPEAKER_00: All of the righteous acts of Jesus are attributed and accredited to your account.
SPEAKER_00: All of it.
SPEAKER_00: And this was the Father's plan.
SPEAKER_00: He loved us and devised a way to redeem us.
SPEAKER_00: And the gospel of Jesus is that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
SPEAKER_00: So the Bible says this kind of grace, this kind of grace that we see in the Bible is hard to understand and it's hard to believe.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what's going on in our hearts, and that's what's going on here.
SPEAKER_00: It's hard to accept.
SPEAKER_00: It can't really be that good.
SPEAKER_00: It can't really be that free.
SPEAKER_00: It's counterintuitive because that's not the way we think about the world and the way that we think about God.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what's going on with these people who are that Paul's talking about, these false gospel promoters.
SPEAKER_00: What are they actually saying?
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't tell us here, but in Acts 15, it's a Jerusalem Council where they're settling the matter in some ways of what's going on with the Jews and the Greeks when it comes to believing in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Do the Greeks have to be circumcised?
SPEAKER_00: And there's a group of people that are coming to Galatia who are saying what we read in Acts 15, verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: Some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.
SPEAKER_00: And so what they're what they're not what are they saying?
SPEAKER_00: What are they not saying?
SPEAKER_00: They're not saying Jesus is bad.
SPEAKER_00: They're saying Jesus is great.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the Christ.
SPEAKER_00: We believe that.
SPEAKER_00: And they would say that we believe that Jesus died and rose again.
SPEAKER_00: They would say we believe that.
SPEAKER_00: But what they're saying is Jesus alone doesn't save you.
SPEAKER_00: It's not grace, faith, Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It's grace, faith, Jesus, plus works, the Old Testament laws.
SPEAKER_00: So they're adding on to that.
SPEAKER_00: And what Paul is saying is they are, this is why they're called Judaizers.
SPEAKER_00: They're saying you have to be circumcised and keep the whole law.
SPEAKER_00: But he's saying this is not a gospel at all.
SPEAKER_00: It's a distortion of the gospel, it's contrary to the gospel, it's changing the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: It is not the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: The problem is, and you probably have encountered this and you probably feel it in your own heart, as Christians living in the modern world, we know we have the scriptures, we have Acts 15 where they settle the matter and say you don't have to be circumcised, it's faith in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: We have the book of Galatians, and yet we still kind of live as if we're still on the hook.
SPEAKER_00: As if salvation is a little bit like a mortgage.
SPEAKER_00: So when Rebecca and I moved to Mississippi a few years ago, we had enough saved up in our old house that we were able to buy a house outright in Mississippi.
SPEAKER_00: And we moved into it, paid it off, we didn't have any debt, we had no mortgage, we had any, we had nothing.
SPEAKER_00: So we moved into a house that was ours, and we never paid another dime to possess the house.
SPEAKER_00: When we moved to Florida, prices were a little more expensive.
SPEAKER_00: And so selling the old house in Mississippi, we we actually had to take out a mortgage on the house here.
SPEAKER_00: And so when we moved into the house, the house is not completely paid for.
SPEAKER_00: So we've been paying ever since so that we will eventually enter into our own home ownership.
SPEAKER_00: That's the way many people think about the Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: Is we would say, well, no, you don't have to obey to be saved.
SPEAKER_00: But we do think now that you're saved, you have to obey.
SPEAKER_00: You have to do all the work, you have to pay the price every single day of obedience to the law for God to accept you.
SPEAKER_00: Is that how it works?
SPEAKER_00: Because if we believe that Jesus fully died for our sins, if we believe that we have the righteousness of Christ fully, we're not, and it's done, then we have this idea we're still paying it off.
SPEAKER_00: But are we paying it off?
SPEAKER_00: When Jesus says at the end of his journey on the cross, he says, to telesty, which is a banking term.
SPEAKER_00: And it means we translate it as it is finished.
SPEAKER_00: But what it means in scripture, or what it means during that time period, is it is paid.
SPEAKER_00: So it's like a big red stamp coming, and Jesus says, it's all paid.
SPEAKER_00: Pm.
SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't rest upon us anymore.
SPEAKER_00: And the problem that Paul has with these Judaizers, with the people who are saying you have to keep all the law, is that they're saying, no, no, you have to have a reason to obey.
SPEAKER_00: You have to, for some reason, obey.
SPEAKER_00: Now, here's here's let me speak clearly.
SPEAKER_00: When you become a Christian, we do obey the law of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Christ calls us to obey his commandments, but not as a prerequisite for salvation, but a fruit of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: Not in order to keep our salvation, but to live out the implications of a salvation we can never lose because Jesus has us fully.
SPEAKER_00: What are you crazy?
SPEAKER_00: You you fail every day.
SPEAKER_00: Ask the people around you.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm not going to ask Rebecca to say all of my failings, but but she could.
SPEAKER_00: My kids could tell my failings.
SPEAKER_00: I could tell you two or three, but that's it.
SPEAKER_00: I don't see them all.
SPEAKER_00: We fail every day, and the gospel, the grace of Christ, covers us every day.
SPEAKER_00: It's not a conditional clause.
SPEAKER_00: Until you realize that Jesus has paid it all in your mind, you're going to think, I have to clean up my life.
SPEAKER_00: I have to put my paper cardboard cut out and approach Jesus with that.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says, You don't do that.
SPEAKER_00: Come to me with all of your burdens, come to me with all of your sins, come to me with all your brokenness, and I will heal that for you.
SPEAKER_00: And the only way you would approach Jesus that way is if you were convinced I can't approach him without fear because all of my sins have been paid for by him.
SPEAKER_00: Until you realize Jesus paid it all in your mind, acceptance by God is going to feel secure or jeopardized based on your performance instead of the performance of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: So that means we can approach him with everything.
SPEAKER_00: We don't deal with our sin and then go to him.
SPEAKER_00: We go to him with our sin.
SPEAKER_00: Now I understand the fear that people have when you start talking about grace, the way I think this passage is talking about it.
SPEAKER_00: Because the fear is what will people's lives look like if they stop obeying what God says?
SPEAKER_00: That's a proper fear.
SPEAKER_00: Paul addresses that in other places in Scripture about how we are called to live out the implications of the gospel in our lives and obey the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: But at this point, he's talking about another fear.
SPEAKER_00: Not the fear of what your life will look like if you keep the law, or if you don't keep the law, but what your life will look like if you try to keep it for the wrong reasons.
SPEAKER_00: Because Paul has lived that.
SPEAKER_00: He's seen legalism's ugly underbelling.
SPEAKER_00: It feeds the self-righteous pride of the human heart.
SPEAKER_00: It masquerades his obedience and commitment and righteousness, but it's a deadly parasite in the community of people.
SPEAKER_00: Paul knows what it does: reduces guilt, distance from God, performance treadmill.
SPEAKER_00: It makes you easily controlled by people like the Judaizers here.
SPEAKER_00: And he knows what God wants here for his people freedom and joy and peace and affection and gratitude and true love.
SPEAKER_00: Legalism kills community, it kills joy and it kills mercy between us because we're measuring and demanding from other people.
SPEAKER_00: Legalism, righteousness must be based on uh legalism says righteousness must be based on my performance.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what the Galatians are saying.
SPEAKER_00: If you're gonna be righteous before God, God's opened the door through Jesus, you walk through it with your obedience.
SPEAKER_00: And you keep doing that every single day.
SPEAKER_00: Earning, paying the mortgage, making sure it's paid.
SPEAKER_00: But what if it's already paid?
SPEAKER_00: I had a Rebecca and had a friend at Clemson and then a friend, Clemson did horribly last night.
SPEAKER_00: Don't even talk to me about that.
SPEAKER_00: Um we had a friend at a university in South Carolina that will go unnamed today.
SPEAKER_00: And uh he did co-ops, you know, he was, I think, engineering, and he would go to an engineering co-op and then he would come back and go a semester and then come back.
SPEAKER_00: And he was back for what he was hoping would be his last semester in school, and uh, because he'd been doing this co-op thing for a while.
SPEAKER_00: And halfway through the semester, one of his professors has uh called him into his office and he said, What are you doing here?
SPEAKER_00: And our friend said, Well, I've been doing a co-op and I know it's been a long time, but I've been gone some semesters, come back, and so that's why I'm back, is because I was doing a co-op.
SPEAKER_00: And he said, No, no, no.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what are you doing here?
SPEAKER_00: You've already earned your degree.
SPEAKER_00: So our friend had been attending classes, working for a degree that had already been earned, and he didn't know it till that moment.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel is a degree that has already already been earned for us in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: He's paid for it.
SPEAKER_00: We're entering in by faith in him and him alone.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus has accomplished it already, and God wants us to know beyond the shadow of a doubt, his grace in the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: But we say we know that.
SPEAKER_00: But Sprohl says we're quick for it to slip through our fingers.
SPEAKER_00: We lose the gospel so quickly.
SPEAKER_00: We lose the gospel of grace so quickly.
SPEAKER_00: Why does grace slip through our fingers so quickly?
SPEAKER_00: Now, I have the session of the church reading a book called The Whole Christ by Sinclair Ferguson.
SPEAKER_00: I love the book.
SPEAKER_00: This is my third read.
SPEAKER_00: I'm enjoying reading it again, and I'm getting as much out of it as I did the first couple of times because we forget and things slip through our fingers.
SPEAKER_00: And in the book, one of the things that he talks about is why is it that we are so quick, so quick for grace to run through our fingers?
SPEAKER_00: It's so easy for legalism and works righteousness to cling to us and to hold on to that.
SPEAKER_00: Why is that?
SPEAKER_00: And so Sinclair Ferguson goes into this conversation about Eve and Adam and Eve in the garden and the serpent.
SPEAKER_00: And he said, if you actually go through the passage where it talks about the serpent and what the serpent said to Eve, his first line, his first lie to Adam and Eve was about the character of God to create things and then put them off limits.
SPEAKER_00: To create beautiful things that he knew we would be drawn to and then to set them off limits.
SPEAKER_00: And so his first words to Eve are Did God really say that you can't eat from any of the trees in the garden?
SPEAKER_00: That is just like him to be that stingy and to set up good things that you can't have.
SPEAKER_00: Now, Eve did not respond terribly to that.
SPEAKER_00: What she ended up saying was, no, he said we couldn't eat from this particular tree, uh, and we can't even touch it or we'll die.
SPEAKER_00: Which God didn't say that last part.
SPEAKER_00: But what she's done is she is bought into this idea is God creates good things to set off limits.
SPEAKER_00: And at that point, and this is what Sinclair Ferguson said, that lie got buried into the human genome.
SPEAKER_00: It changed the polarity of our heart.
SPEAKER_00: So now rather than being drawn to God, we are afraid and back away from.
SPEAKER_00: We mistrust him.
SPEAKER_00: And so what he goes on to say is that both legalism and what he calls antinomianism, being against God's law, are uh non-identical twins from the same womb.
SPEAKER_00: It's the same idea about God that's buried in our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: Except the antinomian person who says, I don't want to, I'm not gonna keep God's law, they're gonna say, I don't even want to be around a God like that.
SPEAKER_00: If that's what God's like, I don't want anything to do with him.
SPEAKER_00: And so they reject God and his laws.
SPEAKER_00: The legalistic person says, Well, I don't want to go to hell, but God is stingy, and well, I guess I'm gonna try really hard to keep his laws as best I can.
SPEAKER_00: But it's the same distrust and mistrust of God that's buried in uh in our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: But when you hear God announcing his presence to Moses and to Israel, and it's pulled through the rest of Scripture, it says, the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.
SPEAKER_00: So in Jesus, we see the freeness of God's love.
SPEAKER_00: God isn't holding back from us, he gave his one and only Son.
SPEAKER_00: And if he gave him, then what is he going to withhold from us?
SPEAKER_00: And the reality is in Christ he's given us everything.
SPEAKER_00: And it's this point that we begin to see the love of God and the gospel of God because he didn't withhold from us.
SPEAKER_00: He gave the best thing he could give to rescue us, to redeem us, and to make us sons and daughters in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And what the reason that Paul has such a harsh tone here to our ears with the Galatian false teachers, with the Judaizers, is because Paul wants us to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God loves us and has paid for everything in Jesus, and we come to Him freely.
SPEAKER_00: And this is why Paul's words are so strong to the Judaizers, is they they had bought into the serpent's view.
SPEAKER_00: They weren't teaching the gospel plus, they were teaching the serpent's view of God, that God is a God who creates and holds back.
SPEAKER_00: And so what that leads us to do is to deny the goodness and grace and generosity of God instead of seeing how far the grace of God really goes.
SPEAKER_00: How far do you think the grace of God really goes?
SPEAKER_00: Does it really cover all of your sins?
SPEAKER_00: Did it cover the one that you purposefully did knowing that God says not to do it?
SPEAKER_00: Did it cover that?
SPEAKER_00: Did it cover the thing that you were engaged in in high school and you hid it from your parents and you hid it from your friends, and it controlled your life?
SPEAKER_00: That one?
SPEAKER_00: Does it cover that one?
SPEAKER_00: How deep does the love of God go?
SPEAKER_00: There's this old hymn, owe the deep, deep love of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free.
SPEAKER_00: So I want you to imagine.
SPEAKER_00: Uh you're on the seashore.
SPEAKER_00: Uh tomorrow it's Labor Day.
SPEAKER_00: So I want you to imagine you're out in the water, and uh you're standing, and it's actually, I guess it would have to be on the uh Atlantic side because you have more waves there.
SPEAKER_00: So you're in the water, the waves are coming, and when I was a kid, my brothers and I would go out in the water and we'd do this thing where we'd stand where we're about chest deep, and I was a shorter, so it was probably about here on me.
SPEAKER_00: And as the waves were coming, we would launch ourselves up and get over the top of the wave as much as we could.
SPEAKER_00: And then we continue doing this, and then you have to make it a little bit risky because we had testosterone, and so we went a little bit further, and so we went to what just barely our toes could touch.
SPEAKER_00: And as the waves came in, we had to launch ourselves even higher to get over the waves because the water's deeper.
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, you know what, how far can we actually go out?
SPEAKER_00: And so you go out a little bit further until you're barely on your tiptoes, and then you get the idea of like, I wonder how far I can go out and still touch the bottom by swimming down.
SPEAKER_00: You ever done that?
SPEAKER_00: So you got which is crazy because it's sharks, and so you you swim out a little bit further into the water and you do the thing where you push your hands backwards like this and you touch, and then you come up and you feel like you went 20 feet down, but it was probably only like two feet down.
SPEAKER_00: And so you come back up and burst through the water, and you're just like, that's that's great.
SPEAKER_00: How far can I go out and do it again?
SPEAKER_00: So maybe you get to maybe 10 feet, and then you don't do it anymore.
SPEAKER_00: Um, how far could you go?
SPEAKER_00: 20 feet, 40 feet, I doubt it.
SPEAKER_00: But then you get to the end where the continental shelf is, and you're never gonna get to the bottom there at all.
SPEAKER_00: That's the love of God.
SPEAKER_00: You're never gonna scrape the bottom.
SPEAKER_00: You're never gonna get to the bottom of it.
SPEAKER_00: The things that you do, the things that you experience, the thing, mistakes that you've made, where you get to the point it's like, I didn't realize that Jesus was all I needed until Jesus was all I had.
SPEAKER_00: Those moments where you realize it's the grace of God or it's nothing.
SPEAKER_00: Nothing is gonna make me right with God unless I have that kind of grace.
SPEAKER_00: So God wants us to know beyond the shadow of a doubt, his grace, his love.
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's not a measly handful that can slip through your fingers.
SPEAKER_00: You're swimming in it.
SPEAKER_00: It's slipping through your fingers all the time as you swim in the grace of God.
SPEAKER_00: He loves you, he's crazy about you.
SPEAKER_00: And he you belong to him through faith in Jesus.